Sizing Up Servers: Intel's Skylake-SP Xeon versus AMD's EPYC 7000 - The Server CPU Battle of the Decade?
by Johan De Gelas & Ian Cutress on July 11, 2017 12:15 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Intel
- Xeon
- Enterprise
- Skylake
- Zen
- Naples
- Skylake-SP
- EPYC
Multi-Threaded Integer Performance
While stand-alone compression and decompression are not real world benchmarks in and of themselves (at least as far as servers go), more and more servers have to perform these tasks as part of a larger role (e.g. database compression, website optimization).
Compression relies a lot on cache, memory latency, and TLB efficiency. This is definitely not the ideal situation for AMD's EPYC CPU. The best AMD CPU has almost 50% more cores than the previous Intel Xeon, but delivers only 11% more performance.
Decompression relies on less common integer instructions (shift, multiply). Intel and AMD cores seems to handle these integer instructions similarly, but AMD's chip has 4 cores more. Fourteen percent more cores result in about 10% faster decompression performance.
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TheOriginalTyan - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Another nicely written article. This is going to be a very interesting next couple of months.coder543 - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
I'm curious about the database benchmarks. It sounds like the database is tiny enough to fit into L3? That seems like a... poor benchmark. Real world databases are gigabytes _at best_, and AMD's higher DRAM bandwidth would likely play to their favor in that scenario. It would be interesting to see different sizes of transactional databases tested, as well as some NoSQL databases.psychobriggsy - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
I wrote stuff about the active part of a larger database, but someone's put a terrible spam blocker on the comments system.Regardless, if you're buying 64C systems to run a DB on, you likely will have a dataset larger than L3, likely using a lot of the actual RAM in the system.
roybotnik - Wednesday, July 12, 2017 - link
Yea... we use about 120GB of RAM on the production DB that runs our primary user-facing app. The benchmark here is useless.haplo602 - Thursday, July 13, 2017 - link
I do hope they elaborate on the DB benchmarks a bit more or do a separate article on it. Since this is a CPU article, I can see the point of using a small DB to fit into the cache, however that is useless as an actual DB test. It's more an int/IO test.I'd love to see a larger DB tested that can fit into the DRAM but is larger than available caches (32GB maybe ?).
ddriver - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
We don't care about real world workloads here. We care about making intel look good. Well... at this point it is pretty much damage control. So let's lie to people that intel is at least better in one thing.Let me guess, the databse size was carefully chosen to NOT fit in a ryzen module's cache, but small enough to fit in intel's monolithic die cache?
Brought to you by the self proclaimed "Most Trusted in Tech Since 1997" LOL
Ian Cutress - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
I'm getting tweets saying this is a severely pro AMD piece. You are saying it's anti-AMD. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ddriver - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
Well, it is hard to please intel fanboys regardless of how much bias you give intel, considering the numbers.I did not see you deny my guess on the database size, so presumably it is correct then?
ddriver - Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - link
In the multicore 464.h264ref test we have 2670 vs 2680 for the xeon and epyc respectively. Considering that the epyc score is mathematically higher, howdoes it yield a negative zero?Granted, the difference is a mere 0.3% advantage for epyc, but it is still a positive number.
Headley - Friday, July 14, 2017 - link
I thought the exact same thing